Make Peace, Not War, In Afghanistan

February 28, 1990

In the year since Soviet soldiers withdrew from Afghanistan, events in that country have not gone according to the Western script.

The Soviet exit last February, after a nine-year war that killed 15,000 troops from the USSR and an estimated 1 million Afghan soldiers, was to have been the beginning of the end for the Najibullah government. Mujahedeen resistance fighters were to cooperate in intensifying pressure on the Kabul regime and eventually win control, fulfilling the hopes of the aid-giving nations bankrolling them through Pakistan.

But the rebels could not transcend factionalism; political, tribal and religious differences among seven groups militated against a concerted effort. Najibullah, meanwhile, strengthened his hold on power and worked on shedding his image as a Soviet puppet. And both sides kept killing Afghans, fighters and civilians alike.

How could the United States and the Soviet Union, arms suppliers to the combatants, countenance the unproductive blood-letting? A charitable answer might be that both were occupied elsewhere during a year of momentous change. The many transformations, however-in Eastern Europe, South Africa and Central America-make stalemate in Afghanistan seem all the more unnecessary. (Mujeeb Khan, an Afghan-American writing on the opposite page, calls the war an anachronism.) Surely it is past time for the superpowers to promote a political settlement.

When Secretary of State James Baker met with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in Moscow early in February, he said the U.S. government would no longer make the removal of Najibullah a condition for starting talks, though the U.S. still wants him to go. Soviet spokesman Gennadi I. Gerasimov acknowledged ``there was agreement on both sides that it is necessary to look for new approaches.``

Negotiations might yield a superpower agreement to end arms shipments to both sides (and reduce government stockpiles of Soviet-supplied weapons), a reassertion of the United Nations to supervise peace-making, and a willingness by all parties to contemplate the possibility of a multilateral coalition governing in Kabul. First, though, must come a commitment to elevate Afghanistan as a foreign policy concern and to actively make peace instead of war.